blankets
that lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat almost all day
with her stockingless feet upon one of the bed pillows that were somehow
always kicking about the floor. She sat there, vaguely tormented
at times by the thought of her absent husband, but most of the time
thinking tearfully of nothing at all, looking with swimming eyes at
her little son--at the big-headed, pasty-faced, and sickly Louis
Willems--who rolled a glass inkstand, solid with dried ink, about the
floor, and tottered after it with the portentous gravity of demeanour
and absolute absorption by the business in hand that characterize the
pursuits of early childhood. Through the half-open shutter a ray of
sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room, beat in the
early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then, travelling
against the sun, cut at midday the big desk in two with its solid and
clean-edged brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm of
flies hovered in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there
amongst yellow papers for many a day. And towards the evening the
cynical ray seemed to cling to the ragged petticoat, lingered on it with
wicked enjoyment of that misery it had exposed all day; lingered on the
corner of the dusty bookshelf, in a red glow intense and mocking, till
it was suddenly snatched by the setting sun out of the way of the coming
night. And the night entered the room. The night abrupt, impenetrable
and all-filling with its flood of darkness; the night cool and merciful;
the blind night that saw nothing, but could hear the fretful whimpering
of the child, the creak of the bedstead, Joanna's deep sighs as she
turned over, sleepless, in the confused conviction of her wickedness,
thinking of that man masterful, fair-headed, and strong--a man hard
perhaps, but her husband; her clever and handsome husband to whom she
had acted so cruelly on the advice of bad people, if her own people; and
of her poor, dear, deceived mother.

To Almayer, Joanna's presence was a constant worry, a worry unobtrusive
yet intolerable; a constant, but mostly mute, warning of possible
danger. In view of the absurd softness of Lingard's heart, every one in
whom Lingard manifested the slightest interest was to Almayer a natural
enemy. He was quite alive to that feeling, and in the intimacy of the
secret intercourse with his inner self had often congratulated himself
upon his own wide-awake comprehension of his